‘All well and good,’ Joshua replied, exceptionally irritated. ‘But I’m not going home as long as there’s a guy walking around who leaves a trail of abused and possibly dead children. I want to put this one to bed.’
Tomasoa slammed his hand on the desk.
‘Let me rephrase this, Calvino. We’ve got it covered! Don’t see it as a personal vendetta, a way to avenge Diba’s death.’
‘We can arrest Lombard now, just based on his driver’s confession,’ Joshua said, as restrained as possible.
‘Lombard is in Moscow with a trade delegation. We have no jurisdiction there.’
‘We have a liaison officer in Moscow. He works at the Dutch embassy. We can turn to him for legal assistance.’ Joshua wasn’t going to let this case be hampered by mourning the loss of Diba for too long. Stagnation was decline. Joshua wanted to plough ahead. Throw himself into the eye of the storm. And it looked like Tomasoa was still willing to help him.
‘Okay, Joshua, there’s a few things we can do before we turn everything over to the national guys. If we can get our hands on substantial evidence that verifies the driver’s statement, then Lombard goes down for the count.’
‘Lombard also rents lodgings in The Hague,’ Joshua said. ‘We need to get into his computer.’
‘Why there? Why not the one at his home?’
‘Home computers have shared files. He’d be crazy to keep photos and films on there. If we want to find something, it’s going to be on his computer in The Hague.’
Tomasoa called the Public Prosecutor and dragged him out of bed to issue an emergency search warrant: a very reliable witness from the minster’s inner circle had substantiated that there had been systematic child abuse for years. Proof of this would likely be found in the computer files of the accused, who was currently in Moscow. The officer hesitated. He first had to consult with the National Crime Agency.
It took Tomasoa and Joshua less than an hour to get to The Hague. Thanks to a handy device to disable the alarm, within minutes they were standing on the fortieth floor of the Kroontoren, where large rectangular tilting windows offered a spectacular view of the city at night. The white walls, the blinds, the sofa and furniture contrasted with the black chandelier, chairs, benches and the explicit modern art on the walls.
They proceeded quickly and quietly, as if they regularly broke into the pieds-à-terre of government ministers. All the rooms and cupboards were searched with flashlights. They found nothing. The place was clean as a whistle.
Then they lowered the blinds in the office and someone from the Dutch Forensic Institute took a seat at Lombard’s computer.
It was quiet in the apartment, except for the hum of the air conditioning. The Forensic Institute’s expert began to crack codes and checked if all the programs had been installed intentionally or were possibly the result of some virus. If they found anything suspicious in Lombard’s files, it was crucial for them to prove he’d downloaded it himself.
The nervous tapping on the keyboard made everyone uneasy. There were brief, repeated moments of silence filled with expectation, followed by a new series of lightning-fast keystrokes.
‘He might be active on the anonymous Tor network,’ said the forensics guy in hushed tones. ‘IP addresses can’t be traced there. The network is intended to allow information to be shared anonymously.’
The tapping went on and on; the silences in between got shorter. Joshua and Tomasoa felt less motivated by the minute. Their eyes met, they silently assessed each other’s level of fatigue, and grimly looked away. The tapping continued.
All of a sudden, there was an unexpectedly long silence followed by mumbled swearing. They perked up, bent over the screen and saw images being extracted from a zip file. Joshua’s relief soon gave way to deep disgust. Nothing could prepare you for seeing images of child abuse.
‘That’s him,’ Joshua cried. He pressed his finger against the touch screen, on the video file of a very young dancer in a light-blue robe.
The music sounded tinny. A shaky camera recorded a heavily made-up boy, awkwardly shaking his hips, raising his arms and stamping his feet, causing small bells to tinkle. The camera jerked towards the boy. A male voice said something off-screen. The boy hesitated, stopped moving. A hand began to pull at the boy’s robe, which made him stumble. The camera zoomed in further; it was right above him now.
The boy lay on the ground and Joshua saw the fear in his eyes.
‘Stop right here.’ Tomasoa’s voice trembled with anger. ‘Can you tell where this was sent from?’
The forensics guy needed several minutes to trace the IP address of the sender’s server.
Once he found it, he whistled softly through his teeth.
The file was sent from the Dutch embassy in Kabul.
10
Farah threw her body weight against the front door of her apartment. When the mercury rose in summer, the wood expanded so she had to grab the doorknob and wrench and tug like mad. By now she hadn’t slept for two nights, couldn’t remember the last time she’d had any food and was unsteady on her legs.
As soon as she got in she fell backwards on her bed, assuming she’d be overcome by all-obliterating sleep before she’d even hit the mattress. Instead she spent many long minutes staring at the ceiling with her thoughts churning and adrenalin jolting through her body. This is what it must feel like to be in freefall and to keep falling and falling …
She remembered Parwaiz’s hand restraining her and wondered what might have happened had he not done that. The Bentley might have knocked her down. In that case, would Parwaiz still be alive?
Only this morning she’d stood by his grave. But now he was beyond the reach of the living.
She recalled leaving David’s house with a load of boxes only a few hours ago. Why had she resigned herself to the idea that David was now beyond her reach? What would have happened if she’d simply carried the boxes upstairs again, unpacked them, put her clothes back in the wardrobe, her books on the old pile and returned all her make-up to the bathroom cabinet?
Now the boxes sat rain-drenched on the blackened ring road. She’d chucked them out so Detective Diba could place the badly injured woman on the back seat. And then Paul Chapelle sat down next to her. This wasn’t her imagination running away with her, ghosts and memories that got the better of her. These were facts. She’d managed to free a man from a burning taxi and he turned out to be the boy who’d made her feverish with infatuation thirty years ago.
The facts had brought a long-hidden story to light. She’d listened to that story on a deserted pier, late at night, before driving its narrator to the police station in Amsterdam where she’d introduced him to Joshua Calvino.
The facts had brought her this evening to the office of Chief Inspector Tomasoa, a tall Indonesian with a strikingly bald head who told her he’d seen her fight in Carré. He asked how she’d come into contact with the driver, and when she explained that he’d originally wanted to talk to Danielle Bernson, she’d caught the meaningful look exchanged between Calvino and Tomasoa.
The next fact had blown her sideways. Danielle was in the mortuary. She’d been murdered in the Amsterdamse Bos that evening. And then, when Tomasoa answered the phone, his confident face turned ashen grey. Without a word about what he’d just been told, but with a shadow clouding his face, he asked Joshua to question the driver. He escorted Farah to the lobby and told her he wanted to speak to her again later.
The proud Chief Inspector was a broken man – that too was a fact. She watched him step into his car and drive off. She longed for home, for bed, for a couple of hours of sleep before it was time to check in at the Aeroflot business-class desk for her flight to Moscow.
But sleep wouldn’t come.
Staring at the ceiling, she relived the past forty-eight hours in fifteen one-minute segments. Then she got up and walked over to the window, opening it wide to let in the fresh night air. Nieuwmarkt was deserted. The Chinese had already cleared the square.
She took a shower and as the warm water ran over her body she pictured Sharada, the river goddess, in the middle of Lavrov’s office. The river goddess belonged to Parwaiz’s world, not to that of Valentin Lavrov.
How come the past was suddenly so terrifyingly close? There was Raylan Chapelle and his love letters to her mother Helai, Paul suddenly jumping into the Carerra next to her after three decades – the many thoughts, memories and images were jostling each other, demanding her attention, and all the while the warm water gushed over her body.
She wished she were standing under a waterfall that would not only wash her body but the world around her clean of all its misery. A waterfall that would push the hands of the clock backwards, bring Danielle Bernson back to life and let Parwaiz dart across the square in The Hague again, pointing at the kites in the sky like a little boy. A waterfall that would enable her to drive back to David’s house, where he’d be waiting for her in the doorway with a broad smile on his face. A waterfall that could heal wounds.
Such a waterfall didn’t exist.
She turned off the tap, dried herself, rubbed her body with lotion and put her necklace back on, followed by the three silver rings, one on each ring finger and the third on her right thumb. She didn’t get dressed yet, but started laying out her clothes for Moscow on the bed. When she was done she put the paper butterfly and the bundle of letters from Raylan Chapelle next to them, alongside a collection of Rumi poems.
She dreaded leaving, for fear she might never return. Moscow felt like an ominous, alien world. But she had to go to find what she was looking for – an explanation for what had happened, a deeper meaning for this inexplicable sequence of events, which, by the looks of it, all led to a single man.
Valentin Lavrov.
Part Five
* * *
HOME
The men who’d picked him up from the orphanage had made him wear really fancy robes and jewellery this time. By now he’d learnt how to make up his eyes, put on lipstick and powder his face. They’d brought him to a large house surrounded by a high wall. This was an important appointment, they told him.
He had to do his best.
The room he was standing in was so high and so badly lit that the ceiling was barely visible. The man who entered had pink puffy skin and pale-blond hair, and he wore a light-coloured suit. He was sweating and just stared at him for a while without a word.
He was told to dance and pretend to be a singing woman without a voice. Then the two men were dismissed. He never saw them again. Meanwhile the man in the suit had taken a seat and was smiling and watching him quietly. The flushed cheeks and blond hair were something he’d never forget; nobody had ever looked at him like this before. So quietly and so long. Finally the man asked him in a whisper to dance as best as he could.
He imagined he was an actress in a romantic film, swathed in thin veils and swirling around to the strains of a beautiful song only he could hear. Then he noticed that the man had taken off his jacket and was coming towards him with a camera. His smile now gone, the man yanked at him so hard he lost his balance and fell down hard on the floor. When he looked up, he saw what the man was doing to himself. Instantly he felt the eagle wings emerge from his body. He spread them and flew out of the large, dark room, and once outside he soared so high he could no longer see the city lights. The air was cool and dark this far above the clouds.
1
After the Ilyushin Il-96 had landed at Domodedovo Airport, Farah saw it was 39 degrees Celsius. She entered a kiosk. The Moscow Times reported on the attack in the metro that morning. It had taken thirty-five lives, and at least three times that number had been injured. Chechen rebels had claimed responsibility. The Dutch trade delegation couldn’t have picked a worse time for its visit, nor could Farah.
The taxi to the city centre cost 2,800 roubles and took more than three hours. They crawled along the six-lane motorway, through the vast suburbs, past huge housing blocks built during the Cold War.
As they neared central Moscow, she saw fewer messy building sites and dug-up pavements. The shops began to look more luxurious and the boulevards lined with limos, Lexuses and Porsches were being kept squeaky clean by a small army of street cleaners with dustpans and brooms. Looming up at the end of Tverskaya Ulitsa, the main artery into the heart of the city, was her final destination, the Hotel National, where Lenin once had his office.
When she finally got to her room, Farah was so exhausted all she could do was peel the clothes off her overheated body before falling into the profound sleep she’d been craving for almost three days.
When she opened her eyes again, a throbbing headache had nestled between her temples.
In the bathroom she drained a large glass of water and swallowed two ibuprofen and then staggered across the garish carpet to the two windows. When she finally managed to open them, the city noise flew in on the muggy air. Despite the late hour, she saw black Mercedes cars with blue flashing lights coming out of the Kremlin across the street.
More than twelve hours ago she’d stood in much the same way, with her eyes trained on Nieuwmarkt, her hands resting on the windowsill, her body leaning forward and her head tilted back the way wolves do when they howl at the moon.
Farah was howling too, inside, that is. She’d lost her sense of self after everything that had happened. She was a journalist, not even a remarkable one. And while she could boast nearly ten years of experience, hardly any of it was as an investigative journalist. The issues she’d investigated had been social ones. She’d never covered a criminal case and never had cause to probe the life of a particular individual.
Now she suddenly found herself dealing with an international network of criminals that was as big as it was inscrutable, and looking into a case that had already claimed several lives in a short amount of time. She didn’t have a clue how to proceed. All she knew was that having plucked her ‘expertise’ from a handful of art books, she was now passing herself off to the prime suspect as a cultural reporter. Having stupidly agreed to Edward’s plan, she currently found herself playing an altogether unfamiliar game.
During the flight to Moscow she realized she’d been wrong to accept Lavrov’s invitation. It was naive to think she could prise potentially incriminating information from a global tycoon. First thing this morning she’d phone Edward and tell him they were on a hiding to nothing. But the more she thought about it, the greater her suspicion there was no way back.
As she pondered all this and stared across the city, she saw a flash of light followed by a large column of fire shooting up above the blocks of flats in the distance. Shortly afterwards she heard the dull thud of the explosion that must have caused it. The vibrations even made the window frames shake. Farah was frozen to the spot. The entire city seemed to hold its breath. Then the first sirens could be heard in the distance. A low-flying helicopter sped towards a bright orange-red cloud of dust shot through with flames.
The realization hit her like lightning. Here in Moscow she was no longer the cosmopolitan citizen she imagined herself to be when basking in the safety and security of Amsterdam. Now she was one of millions of anonymous, disaffected people in an overcrowded city that seemed to be closing in on her.
2
The morning after the accident on the motorway, Paul and Edward took a taxi to the family farm. As he walked through the garden towards the house, Paul saw the fragile figure of his mother in the doorway. Isobel was, as always, wearing eccentric make-up and wrapped in batik cloth with oriental floral designs. When they embraced he caught a whiff of the patchouli oil she always dabbed on her neck. It smelled like long ago, like home.
That same evening he was going to hop on a plane and follow Farah to Moscow. He thought the pretext of the AND publishing an art supplement was an idiotic plan.
Given Moscow was his next destination, it was high time to recontact his main source there, a female journalist who always had inside information on Russia’s business and political elite.
Anya Kozlova worked for the Moskva Gazeta, a liberal weekly that followed and critically commented on Russia’s President Potanin’s every step and outspokenly opposed mafia organizations, corruption and conflicts of interest between politicians and businessmen. Not only did the Russian government consider the Moskva Gazeta a giant pain in the ass because of all of this, but it was one of the few papers that pressed for a peaceful solution to the unending conflict in Chechnya. ‘Haven’t we learned anything from Afghanistan?’ Anya had written years ago when the Russians brutally invaded the breakaway province.
Since going off to Johannesburg three years earlier, Paul hadn’t spoken to Anya. He knew the reunion wouldn’t be easy. She’d undoubtedly rub his nose in the fact he was unable to maintain relationships because he was socially and emotionally inept. Anything to make it clear she still held a grudge because he’d never fallen for her charms. Anything to have the last word.
Anya Kozlova had chosen journalism because of her intense need to prove a point. The greater the resistance of others, the harder she went up against them. This, and her innate hatred of anything that even carried a whiff of authority, had solidified her reputation of being a hard-hitting journalist. It gave many people reason to dislike her.
‘I knew one day you’d come knocking on my door again,’ she said when she heard his voice. ‘Rumour has it that things aren’t going so well with you.’
‘That’s right,’ Paul said, indulging her. ‘I need your help.’ Finally, he heard her thinking.
‘How can I be of service?’
He explained in detail the connection between the Dutch finance minister, the entrepreneur Armin Lazonder and industrialist Valentin Lavrov. It hadn’t made much of an impression on her, but when he talked about how it was all linked to an Afghan boy, he knew he’d hit a nerve. Anya had a weak spot for children.
Butterfly on the Storm Page 41